CERN's New Collider Design Is Four Times Larger Than the LHC (vice.com)

If built, the Future Circular Collider will be 10 times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider, and could discover new types of particles. From a report: The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson particle at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is widely considered to be one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in history. It validated a half-century of research about the basic building blocks of matter, and remains the crowning achievement of modern particle physics. Now, CERN wants to follow up on the LHC's smashing success with a super-sized structure called the Future Circular Collider (FCC).

This next-generation particle accelerator would boast 10 times the observational power of the LHC and would stretch across 100 kilometers (62 miles), encircling the Swiss city of Geneva and much of the surrounding area. CERN published its first conceptual design report for the FCC on Tuesday. The four-volume roadmap was developed over five years by 1,300 contributors based at 150 universities, according to a statement.

Comments

Re:Diablo

[Joce640k]

The current one failed to create a black hole so they need to try again.

Re:Two questions.

[spth]

According to the article, the current cost estimate is 17 G$.

For comparison: That is 30% more than a Ford-class aircraft carrier, 40% more than the Gotthard Base Tunnel.

Scienctists have a dream...

[bobbied]

Well, for the cost of this monstrosity, what else could we do? Where I like dreams like this, are we SURE that we need the collision energies this new collider will give us? What burning questions will this tool help answer that the old one didn't? Are we sure there isn't any way to improve the current collider without drilling more than 180 miles of tunnels?

Yea, I know that much of what we *could* find out with this thing is nothing more than educated guessing, but I wonder about the cost and schedule needed to build something this size. Is there something else which holds more promise than driving sub-atomic particle physics to higher energies? Are there benefits here? I mean other than providing answers to settle the various bets made by proponents of the various competing theories now?

Maybe the money would be better spent on bio-medical research, genetic manipulation of food crops, Fusion energy commercialization or space exploration? Just a thought guys.

Re:Scienctists have a dream...

[crgrace]

I get what you're saying, and people have been making the same arguments since the very beginning. In fact, when Ernest Lawrence was trying to build his first cyclotron (and thus jumpstart high-energy physics) he asked the local power company (PG&E) for funds and they responded in a very similar way to your response. Luckily, Lawerence was able to get the money, a Nobel prize, and pave the way to a new era in team-based science.

To answer a couple of questions, you're right that it is unclear if a new collider would turn the physics world on its head. It would certianly produce large numbers of Higgs particles and therefore make studying the Higgs much easier. It could also rule out many potential string theories (and theories on supersymmetry). If it did find supersymmetric particles that would be earth-shattering, as it would overturn the current standard model and would hold the promise for un-imagined future technologies.

As for whether you need a larger collider, yes, basic high-school physics can show that only a larger diameter will let you further increase the energy at the interaction point (assuming a circular hadron collider).

Now, you ask is this worth investing in, instead of, say, biomedical or genetic research. I think this is a false dichotomy. The answer is we should invest in both and all. Besides increasing our knowledge of physics, accelerator research has led to a huge number of useful technologies that were invented along the way. For example, high energy physics were among the first "Big Data" applications and dealing with this data led to the World Wide Web. In addition, breakthroughs enabling digital cameras, clean energy, materials science, and bioimaging have been made possible in the last few decades based on experience gained building these kinds of accelerators. I think there are benefits here and this is work worth doing.

Re:Scienctists have a dream...

[tlhIngan]

Or maybe invest more in plasma wave linear accelerators which can potentially be much smaller.

Wouldn't work - wrong kind of particle accelerator.

There are two kinds of particle accelerators, and you use one or the other depending on the science you want to do.

The LHC is basically a particle accelerator - you take two particles (consisting of multiple quarks) and slam them into each other. This generates lots of collisions, and the quarks smashing into each other generate all sorts of new particles. As you can see, an accelerator like the LHC is used to perform "new science" - to discover what can only be done by colliding lots of random quarks and particles together to see what new forms of particles you get. This works because the particles you collide aren't uniform (a neutron or proton is not a homogeneous thing - and they can have three or four quarks). Thus when they collide, you're smashing things with varying energy and composition, to form new things of varying composition. Thus when trying to discover the undiscovered, like the Higgs boson, you need this kind of collider - it generates the random variations and energies you need to discover.

The other type of collider uses electrons, which are very precise. You use these colliders to perform in-depth science - if you're probing stuff, the fact that you can control the electron beam precisely is why it's good - the energy distribution is highly controlled so you can probe the properties of whatever you're exploring. If you find a way to reliably make Higgs, for example. you can use this kind of collider to probe its properties. And since they are only accelerating really light electrons, they can be much smaller to get them to higher energy levels. Accelerators like the LHC have to accelerate heavy particles by comparison so it takes a lot more energy and time.

Re:Two questions.

[Merk42]

According to the article, the current cost estimate is 17 G$.

17 Gillion Dollars??

Re:Won't happen

[fahrbot-bot]

This won't ever be built. The era of big physics is over.

Ya, but, contrary to their name, Large Hadrons are actually really, really tiny. :-)

Re:Two questions.

[spth]

I'd assume that it will be paid mostly by CERN member states. Top contributors to CERN's 2019 budget:

• Germany (21%)
• United Kingdom (16%)
• France (14%)
• Italy (10%)

See https://fap-dep.web.cern.ch/rp... for details.

Re:Two questions.

[spth]

Mexico is not a CERN member state, which pay most of the CERN budget.

While Mexico has a co-operation agreement with CERN, it (like most countries with observer status or co-operation agreements, which also includes the US, Russia and China) has apparently not contributed to the 2019 budget: https://fap-dep.web.cern.ch/rp...

Re:DANGER Will Robinson

[jeff4747]

The National Ignition facility is also dangerous as it means they will likely lose containment

Uh.....they ran it at full power starting in 2012. We're still here, and there were no containment failures nor underground ignition.

Ya might wanna cut back on the physics theories from video games.

no new physics

[epine]

The Human Genome Project was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the sequence of nucleotide base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identifying and mapping all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and a functional standpoint.

It remains the world's largest collaborative biological project.

The $3-billion project was formally founded in 1990 by the US Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health, and was expected to take 15 years. ... Taking into account inflation, the project roughly cost $5 billion.

I strongly suspect you could presently invest $50 billion into biology (with perhaps a side order of machine learning) before your incremental ROI declined anywhere close to this $17 b facility.

Which is not to say that this facility is worthless, but that the time is ripe for investment elsewhere.

The two main arguments for this facility are: 1) keeping the existing expertise alive; and 2) feeding the beast of existing appropriations directed to this technology sector.

I read Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex (2015) within the last year and I know that the achievements in this line of research have historically been immense, and I still don't think we should continue with yet another colossal expenditure, because the point of diminishing returns is exactly the facility we just built: worth it to confirm the Higgs, but no new physics.

People were dying inside when the LHC discovered no new physics for precisely this reason.

Furthermore, even if you discover new physics at this energy scale, it surely won't trickle into practical applications—not outside of cosmological theory, in any case.

The only way this gets built is on the velocity of established funding tributaries.

Meanwhile proteomics / machine learning are poised to deliver to the 21st century what particle physics delivered to the 20th century, if we're smart enough to look forwards, rather than perseverate on former glories.